Assistant Professor David Van Horn and Dr. Niki Vazou win Distinguished Paper Award at OOPSLA 2018
Assistant Professor David Van Horn and Dr. Niki Vazou, a Basili Postdoctoral fellowship alumna, have won a distinguished paper award at OOPSLA 2018. Their paper, entitled “Gradual Liquid Type Inference” included Professor Éric Tanter of University of Chile and Inria Paris.
The groups' ultimate goal has been to build the next generation of verification-integrated programming languages that empower programmers to make strong correctness claims and have them automatically validated by the language. Thanks to efforts by Vazou, and her collaborators, these expressive verification-integrated languages exist today in the form of Liquid Haskell.
However, a critical problem remains--how to take huge code bases written in languages that lack these verification features and migrate them to languages like Liquid Haskell. This award-winning paper provides a first step toward solving that problem by demonstrating how to use so-called gradual type systems to automatically port traditional programs into verification-integrated languages.
“We were fortunate to work with Éric Tanter at the University of Chile, one of the leading experts on gradual type systems,” said Van Horn. “This work is the capstone result of Niki's Basili Fellowship here at UMD,” he added. Vazou begins her post-fellowshipo career as an assistant professor at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies in Software Development Technologies (IMDEA) shortly after presenting this work at OOPSLA in Boston in November.
Read more about their paper here.
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